Friday 22 June, 2001
Working With Dinosaurs
The fascination many of us have with dinosaurs lies in their extraordinariness. After all, there’s nothing on earth like them and the likelihood of these gigantic tank-like monsters making a comeback is pretty unlikely.
But as Andrew Luck-Baker discovers in The Great Dinosaur Hunt, the people who unearth the world of giant reptiles can be just as intriguing as their fossilised prey.
The largest land animals that ever lived, dinosaurs thrived for more than 175 million years. Yet it wasn’t until 1842, that the term Dinosauria, meaning ‘terrible lizards’ was coined by the English comparative anatomist Richard Owen.
These amazing oversized reptiles encased in armour have captured the imagination of scientists and adventurers for centuries. Indeed, the search for dagger-toothed raptors with huge toe-claws designed to disembowel with a single swipe, has proved to be surprisingly irresistible.
Not surprising then, that the scientists who have discovered, studied and theorised about these amazing animals are often equally as strange and interesting as their fossilised prey.
Franz Baron Nopsca von Felso-Szilvas
One of the most fascinating is Austro-Hungarian nobleman and self-taught palaeontologist, Franz Baron Nopsca von Felso-Szilvas.
Born in 1877 he died in tragic circumstances at the age of 56, after embarking on an exciting journey in search of dinosaurs.
To say that Franz Nopsca had an interesting and varied life would be an under-statement. As well as being a palaeontologist he was also a geologist, biologist, highly respected scholar of Albanian culture, spy, motorbike enthusiast, multi-linguist and homosexual.
Some of his major life events included a failed bid to become the King of Albania, a scheme which involved his marriage to a wealthy if naïve New York heiress, a discovery of ‘dwarf’ dinosaur species on his Transylvanian family estate… oh yes, and a murder and ultimate suicide.
Accounts of Nopsca’s life all too often end up focusing on the spying, the sex and the suicide.
| 'The eccentric dinosaur hunter shot his Albanian partner of 30 years in a fit of rage and jealousy and then turned the gun on himself.' | |
But his discoveries and ideas about dinosaurs were extremely influential during his lifetime.
The Duck-Billed Dinosaur
Many of Nopsca’s theories were well ahead of his time and have since been resurrected by modern day dinosaur researchers after decades of dormancy.
Nopsca’s way into palaeontology was opened up quite by chance by his younger sister Ilona, who in 1895 happened upon some strange fossil bones on the Nopsca estate in what is now Romania.
Intrigued, the 18-year-old Franz took them to an eminent geologist at the University of Vienna to find out what they were. The great professor told him to work it out for himself, which Franz Nopsca did, producing a detailed and very professional description and interpretation of the specimens.
He named the animal Telmatosaurus and, having briefed himself on the dinosaurian studies of others, realised it was a strangely small variety of duck-billed dinosaur.
‘Dwarf’ Dinosaurs
With his motorbike to get him from site to site, Nopsca discovered more ‘dwarf’ dinosaurs in Transylvania, including a miniature armoured form and a long-necked Brontosaur-type which was a mere six metres long.
This is tiny compared to the usual 20-30 metres for the so-called sauropod variety.
‘They would have made cute pets,’ says Dr David Weishampel, a modern day expert on Eastern European dinosaurs at Johns Hopkins University in the USA, and a fan of Franz Nopsca David Weishampel says that Nopsca had a brilliant idea about these budget-sized dinosaurs and why they were small.
Nopsca thought about the creatures as a community, as members of an ecosystem, and proposed that their modest scale could be explained by the fact that they had lived isolated on a large island.
Seventy million years ago, Transylvania had been separated from the rest of what then existed of Europe by sea. This idea was in part influenced by earlier discoveries of extinct dwarf elephants and hippos on Mediterranean islands, but Nopsca was the first to think about dinosaur biology and evolution being influenced by such factors.
Palaeophysiology
The first few decades of the 20th century, saw Nopsca’s contemporaries across the Atlantic get caught up in the hysteria of the North American dinosaur bone rush.
Their emphasis was to get as many dinosaur skeletons as possible out of the ground and give them a name. That was about it science-wise.
But Nopsca, along with a handful of other contemporary European palaeontologists, thought seriously about dinosaurs as living creatures and biological machines.
According to Professor Hans Dieter Sues of the Royal Ontario Museum in Canada, Franz Nopsca founded the discipline of ‘palaeophysiology’ - the study of clues in fossil to deduce how the bodies of extinct animals functioned internally.
| 'Nopsca speculated on how fast and big dinosaurs might have grown, and theorised about the physical differences between male and female creatures.' | |
He proposed that the flying reptiles - the pterosaurs - must have been warm-blooded, and that the first birds evolved from small meat-eating dinosaurs, flapping their arms to and fro to speed their pursuit of prey.
Ahead Of His Time
With hindsight, some of Franz Nopsca’s ideas are a touch crazy, but equally many are now the stuff of current debate, and even of received wisdom, with dinosaur researchers of the 21st century.
It’s also worth pointing out that his voluminous body of palaeontological work was done in parallel with this geological work, which included a theory of plate tectonics 40 years ahead of its time.
Furthermore, he was juggling all this with his adventures and ethnographic research in Albania, which was then the ‘Wild West’ of Europe.
He also managed to make time during World War I to disguise himself as a peasant and undertake spying missions throughout the Balkans for the Austro-Hungarian Empire.
Franz Nopsca may have been a little mad, bad and dangerous to know, but dinosaur science would have been very dull without him.
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| The Great Dinosaur Hunt |
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During the 150 million years that dinosaurs roamed the earth, a multitude of weird and wonderful species evolved.
The Great Dinosaur Hunt focuses on something equally as fascinating – some of the human characters who have discovered and studied dinosaurs over the last 200 years.
The series of three programmes includes a look at the first real dinosaur hunter, Gideon Mantell, an English doctor who was the first to identify the fossil reptiles as a single dynasty, but whose glory was snatched by the arrogant scientist Franz Owen.
To discover when you can hear the rest of The Great Dinosaur Hunt in your region, click on our schedule pages here. |
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